Christabel's Room: A spellbinding Victorian gothic romance

by Abigail Clements

  My face was burning with embarrassment, anger that he had mocked me, but mostly pleasure that he had kissed me. The anger melted. I climbed the stairs dreamily, the music of the evening swirling in my head. Creagdhubh seemed a place of dreams, full of candlelight and the warm glow of silver.

  I reached my room and stepped from the dream back into the nightmare.

  Chapter Eight

  I had gone singing softly to myself through the darkened room, unthinking, and flung open the curtain to look out on the moonlit hills. My eyes wandered over the landscape, my thoughts still on Duncan. Then, girlishly, I thought that if I pressed my face against the pane and looked down, close below, I might catch a last glimpse of him leaving the big house for his own.

  Love may not make one blind, but it certainly doesn’t make one very sensible either. I had seen him only minutes before, but intent upon a chance to see him once more before the morning, I slipped between curtain and window and cupping my hands around my eyes, stared down into the darkness.

  I caught sight of a figure and felt a flutter of pleasure which turned to horror. I could have been mistaken once, but not twice. The slim form, the soft skirts blowing in the night wind, the hooded head; the woman was there again on the cliff of Alltdhubh.

  My impulse was to do as I had done before, to fling down the curtain, and hide in my bed, like a child. I caught hold of the window ledge, grasping for sanity.

  Then the great front door of Creagdhubh banged shut, as Duncan stepped into view at the far end of the house. Fear for him gripped me, though what I expected this fragile, ghostly figure to do I cannot imagine; the fear of such things lies in their being beyond imagining.

  But as I watched, the dark form faded into the shadow and vanished. Of course, I thought, that is the way of ghosts, it would not allow itself to be caught out by a mortal man. A few long strides took Duncan out of my field of vision, and as he disappeared behind the next wing of the house, I looked back into the darkness below me, and, slowly, the figure re-emerged from the shadows.

  Was it, then, only for my eyes? But beneath my fear a new rational suspicion was growing. It had hidden itself; it had not wanted to be seen. What ghost fears to be seen?

  There was only one way of finding out. I quickly turned and, lifting my cloak from the back of a chair, stepped out into the corridor, leaving the door to my darkened room open. The house was dim and silent.

  Hurriedly, I made my way through the corridors and down the stairs to the central hallway and the tall front door. As I reached it, I whirled suddenly, certain that I had heard the click of a door latch behind me. I could see nothing. The hall remained still and dark. I turned to the door again, trying to calm my high-strung nerves and opened it, slipping outside and leaving the door slightly open.

  I ran down the curved drive toward the bridge, my slippered feet sliding on the frosty cobbles. I reached the edge of the ravine where I had seen the woman’s form and stopped, listening. Faintly I heard the tapping of quick, light feet. I peered into the darkness on the bridge and dimly made out the hurrying figure. Then it passed under the lighted window of the gate house, and I recognized Rowena’s scarlet hooded-cloak.

  So that was it. No ghost at all, but a young girl going to meet her lover. My fears for Rowena were well founded, and already too late.

  I dared not follow further. She might hear me or see me, and I did not want a confrontation with her. That I must leave to her father.

  I turned in the cold night feeling sad and defeated, and then shrank back into the shadow of the wall as Rowena herself had done a few minutes earlier. Someone had left the kitchen entrance of Creagdhubh and was walking now toward the bridge.

  I was not surprised to see it was Roderick. Although I had not known he was still in the big house, that was not in itself unusual. He spent many late evenings in Uncle Iain’s library, or talking with Gordon in his room upstairs.

  He walked across the bridge with lithe, quick steps, eager no doubt for the meeting with his new, young mistress. The window light fell on him as it had on Rowena, shining on his curling dark hair, his lean, young, sensuous face. It was hard to imagine that such a gay, handsome creature could possess so cold and cruel a nature.

  I thought of the wildcat in the cage behind the barn, with its shining green eyes and its claws sheathed in grey velvet.

  There was nothing I could do here, and I was suddenly aware of the cold of the night and the late hour. I returned to the house, shutting the heavy oak door behind me and climbed the stairs. When I reached my room I stopped short, trying to make my muddled, tired mind work.

  The door to my room was shut. Distinctly I remembered hurrying out, tying the ribbons of my cloak and, I was certain, not shutting the door.

  I shook my head, too weary to cope with yet another mystery. When I entered the room and lit a candle, there was no longer a mystery.

  My writing desk was in a shambles. Papers and pens were scattered on the floor. The secretaire was pushed to one side, the lid wide open, the little compartments scattered in abandon. The gold pin of the secret drawer lay on the floor, the drawer itself upside down on the desk. There had been no caution this time, no careful replacement of the contents.

  As I picked it up, I knew that I would find the drawer empty. This time the answers were all too easy to grasp. I had heard a door latch before I left the house; the door of the library, opening slightly under Roderick’s hand, quickly, briefly, just long enough to see that it was myself and that my room was waiting, unoccupied.

  What ironic good fortune for him. Just as I was out watching his mistress hurry to meet him, he was in my room, securing for himself the evidence of his last indiscretion. Whether he questioned my purpose in leaving the house, I did not know.

  More likely he simply made grateful use of the chance it gave him. There were other reasons for me to leave Creagdhubh at night, other more obvious reasons. Just as Rowena slipped through the night to meet Roderick, why should I not have been on my way to meet Duncan? Roderick’s own outlook on life would likely make that a foregone conclusion, although even in the candlelight of my bedroom I blushed with shame at the thought.

  Now Christabel’s diary was in Roderick’s hands, for him to do with as he would. I wondered, would he read it, gloating over his conquest? Suddenly a chilling realization came to me as I pictured the diary as I had found it, with its broken lock proclaiming the violation of its privacy. Unless Roderick had come once to my room to merely read the diary, a second time to take it ‒ which was hardly logical ‒ he would even now realize that the diary had been read by someone else.

  And the only person with access to it was myself. Rightly he would assume I had read the diary, though he could not realize some other person had also, any more than he could realize why I read it. No, he would assume it was only shameful curiosity that had led me to discover what sort of a person he really was, and the awful thing he had done at Creagdhubh.

  I sat down on the bed, the candlelight wavering in my trembling hand. I knew full well that Roderick was an utterly ruthless man. He would do anything to get what he wanted. And now he had reason to do murder.

  For a long time I sat shivering as the fire and the candle burned low, feeling out the bars of the strange trap in which I found myself.

  I knew the truth about Roderick; what he had done to Christabel, and what he was doing to Rowena. But I was powerless to stop him, for to do so would involve revealing what I knew to Uncle Iain, and I knew he could not bear it. My only hope was to somehow persuade Rowena of the true nature of the man she loved, without revealing the story of her mother’s tragedy. I doubted she would believe me anyhow.

  I had no proof. I sat up straight on my bed as the guttering candle dripped hot wax on my fingers. That was something I had not considered.

  Blowing out the dying candle, I rose and went to the fire. Kneeling there on the hearth I stirred the coals with the poker and stayed, staring into the pale remnants of the flames. Of cou
rse, I had no proof. The diary was gone. The evidence of Christabel’s adultery was no longer in my hands.

  I absorbed the meaning of the realization slowly, with a mixture of anger and relief. So Roderick was free now; no one could prove anything. If I went tomorrow to Uncle Iain and told him everything, who was to say that he would believe me, with my story of secret compartments, hidden diaries, and ghosts on the cliff edge. More likely he would accept the outraged protestations of Roderick whom he knew and trusted, and conclude that I had gone quite pathetically mad.

  Even, I reminded myself, my tale of Rowena’s tryst would be without proof. I had seen the girl go to the gate house. But I had not seen her go in. What would I say if I confronted her with my suspicions, and she had, incredibly, some simple, innocent explanation.

  No, both of Roderick’s secrets were as yet safe. I could not deny the relief I felt knowing that he would not, after all, consider me a threat.

  Still, if I could prove to myself what I feared regarding Rowena, I would then be in a position to confront her with my knowledge and at least attempt to dissuade her. Though if that failed, I would in the end be forced to go to her father. But I most certainly could not do so until I was sure my assertions were correct. I decided then that if I were to see her leave the house at night again, I would follow her and learn the truth.

  Slowly I got up and undressed in the darkness and got into bed. But even as I lay under the warm quilts, the turning circles of thought would not leave me.

  Even though I could prove nothing, I still knew about Roderick. And he knew that I knew. We two, Roderick and I, were in the same cage together, circling like two wild things, waiting.

  How could we continue to live under one roof?

  Chapter Nine

  Somehow, we did continue and we maintained our strange truce throughout the weeks that followed.

  The disappearance of the diary brought with it an odd peace to Creagdhubh. Roderick, knowing himself to be safe, seemed to take perverse pleasure in my company, alternately teasing and flattering me.

  Perhaps in his vanity he assumed that he could win me also, thus ensuring himself my loyal secrecy forever. I confess that had I not known by chance his true nature, I might also have been ensnared, like Christabel in her foolishness and Rowena in her innocence. But I did know, and I had only to remind myself of Christabel’s despairing confessions to shield myself with a wall of disdain.

  It was not an easy game we played; the quiet evenings in the drawing room, where I was forced to watch Roderick make mockery of Uncle Iain’s honourable trust; Rowena alternately petulant child in the schoolroom, and rebellious woman flirting with her own ruin.

  And always there was Gordon, moving in his own world, which only occasionally collided with ours. Such collisions, sparked by some trivial incident, some minor innocent reference to his mother, to her possessions, even to the ways of women in general, would send him into a sudden savage flair of temper. The company would freeze, watching fearfully as he turned his bitterness on one or the other of us.

  Occasionally it was his father and occasionally Rowena. More often it was Duncan, and most often myself, as though the combination of my womanhood and my lack of place in the household, made me some symbol of the loss of his mother and the encroachment of strangers in the sacred shrine of his home.

  Only Roderick was spared the hatred that rose from the boy’s twisted grief. He remained, as always, Gordon’s friend and confidant. But as the weeks went on, any hopes I had of Gordon in some way recovering and rejoining our world dimmed to nothing. He had locked himself forever in a place beyond our reach.

  For me, the troubles of Creagdhubh were a backdrop, albeit a disturbing one, to a new personal adventure. I was in love with Duncan MacKenzie, and having embarked on this grand new road, I had gained the beautiful, foolish hope of lovers, that their love will cure the whole world. In spite of the tense, frightening play we were enacting beneath the dark slate-roofs of Creagdhubh, when I remember those days, I still envision the wet, windy moor, and Duncan and I laughing, riding shaggy highland ponies through the rain.

  The high, rocky pastures became a refuge, whether we rode for pleasure up the narrow hill-paths on our tough mountain ponies, or we walked, side by side with the yapping collie dogs, working the sheep. Of course there was solitude in the open windswept reaches of heather, but even more valued, there was safety. Duncan never knew with what foreboding I crossed the stone bridge on our return from those afternoons and came once more within reach of the troubled occupants of Creagdhubh.

  As winter slowly and reluctantly turned to spring, and the days grew longer and longer, Duncan and I spent more and more time up on the hill. There was indeed much work to be done, and my practical knowledge of farming grew rapidly, as for the first time in my life I was allowed the pleasure of rough physical work.

  There are some, I know, would not approve of a young woman of my position engaging in such rugged activities, but Papa had had a wise eye for the foolishness of some conventions and had raised me to believe that no honest work was beneath me; nor need I expect my feminine physique to render me useless for all but the lightest tasks.

  So we worked, and I learned. Not only about the skills of farming, but also about the land about us. Duncan’s knowledge of wildlife was wide, and he had learned from his mother the secrets of growing things which could be eaten, and which cured illness. He knew too which of the multitude of lichens and tree barks and leaves and berries could be coaxed to bring forth the soft, beautiful colours of the native dyes.

  He told me stories as we rode home in the dusk; old, old stories about the people who had lived here through history and before history. He taught me to recognize the mounded squares of rubble that had once been homes, and told me about the old families who had lived there once.

  The land was wound full of stories and superstitions and other beings, as if a whole world of the strange and unnatural lived side by side with us, invisible, on the same steep, misty hillsides.

  At first I did not always believe Duncan, recalling how he had teased me about the kelpie on our first ride to the village together. Then once, out of curiosity I asked Mrs. Cameron if she believed in Duncan’s water-horse that he claimed to have seen with his father.

  ‘Och, no, child,’ she said, turning her head away from me. ‘He should no’ be filling your head with stories of such things.’

  ‘But why not,’ I laughed, ‘if they are only stories?’ For the first time since I had met her, I sensed she did not wish to talk. Reluctantly then she answered, telling me of her own childhood, when her grandmother worked the ferryboat, just as Mrs. MacDonald did today.

  Her grandmother had come from Cannich, a remote glen in the far hills beyond the loch, so remote that in the days of the covenanters the cause of Protestantism had never reached its isolated people. The old lady, then, was Catholic, as was Mrs. Cameron herself, and as she leaned on the rough tiller of her tiny boat she recited her rosary in whispered Gaelic and added after each Hail Mary, the prayer for protection from the water-horse of Loch Ness.

  Vividly I imagined the old woman, the small child huddled beside her, the click of the beads and the soft, muttered Gaelic prayers, as the boat slipped silently through the dark, mist-hung waters. I shuddered inside, and I never again mentioned the water-horse to anyone.

  Later when Duncan told me of other mysteries of his native land, of neighbours blessed and cursed with second sight, of processions of ghosts, and magic ships, and holy wells I did not question, but came to believe that things did happen here that happened nowhere else.

  One soft spring day, when the hillsides were so splashed with golden gorse in bloom that the faint, sweet scent of it rose in the air all around, Duncan took me aside from the road to the pasture, leading me down a beaten sheep-track, not far at all from the house.

  ‘See, lass,’ he said, when we had walked some small distance, ‘there is something I had not shown you.’

 
I looked, finding nothing in sight but a mound of piled rubble rising from the centre of a close-cropped, grassy field.

  ‘What is it, then?’ I asked.

  ‘It is a cairn,’ he replied, and I nodded. I knew about cairns, round heaps of stones marking the site of some point of significance, perhaps the resting point of a coffin on its journey to the churchyard. It was customary for each passer-by to add a stone, and thereby preserve a respected memory throughout the years.

  ‘But this one is different,’ Duncan said, leading me a little way down the hillside. ‘It is very old, older than history. And it is a chambered cairn. It was such a place where folk buried a great chieftain, in the old, old times before remembering.’

  ‘It is a grave, then,’ I said

  ‘It was. There is a room in the centre, there, and there is a roof above, though in the centre it has fallen.’

  ‘Is it haunted?’ I asked.

  Duncan said, ‘No. It will not be haunted. I have never heard of such a thing. Though Angus the keeper says he has seen there lights in the night. I am not believing him. He thinks too much on such things.’

  I smiled to myself. Along with everything else, there was a certain logic in it all. There may be ghosts all over the hillsides but only in their proper places. One was not to go about expecting them just anywhere.

  ‘And what is it that is amusing you, now?’ asked Duncan.

  I shook my head; I couldn’t possibly explain.

  ‘Is it laughing at me, you are?’ Duncan demanded, sounding really rather fierce.

  ‘No,’ I said, giggling, my hands hiding my face. He caught both my hands in his and we struggled, laughing and stumbling amongst the gorse.

  I slipped and fell into the sun-warmed grass, and he fell too, his right hand still holding my wrists and his left slipping beneath my back, under my heavy, loose hair.